Greek Myths: A New Retelling
Charlotte Higgins
Jonathan Cape, £20, 336 pages
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In Ancient Greek, muthos simply meant a traditional story – and, to modern Greeks, a Mythos means the best beer in the country.
The Greek myths, then, are really the best stories ever told – and some of the earliest. As Virginia Woolf said in her 1925 essay “On Not Knowing Greek”, it is in Greek literature that you find the original human being. In the Greek myths, we meet humans and their stories before, in Woolf’s words, “their emotions have been worn into uniformity”.
